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Friday, 14 October 2011

Cruises in Griffith's Valuation of Ireland 1848-1864

Howard Mathieson, one of my colleagues in the Guild of One-Name Studies, has been working on producing maps showing the distribution of a surname in Ireland at parish level based on the Griffith's Valuation Indexes. He has very kindly produced some maps for me showing the distribution of the Cruise surname and related variant spellings. From 1848 to 1864 Ireland's Valuation Office conducted its first survey of property ownership in Ireland in order to determine the amount of tax each person should pay towards the support of the poor within their Poor Law Union. This survey became known as Griffith's Valuation after Richard Griffith who was the director of the office at that time. The survey recorded the names of both landlords and tenants throughout the country in both rural and urban areas, and it provides a snapshot of the population at a key point in Irish history, beginning at the time when the Great Famine was at its peak. It is a particularly important resource because no Irish censuses have survived prior to 1901 and it effectively serves as a census substitute. Griffith's Valuation can be found online on the Ask about Ireland website.

Howard's first map below shows the distribution of Cruise tenants in Ireland. It's interesting to see that there are still Cruises in the east of the country in Meath and Dublin, the counties where the Cruise family first held lands when they arrived in Ireland in the twelfth century, though there has been a noticeable westward drift into Galway and Mayo.

The second map below shows the distribution of tenants of Cruise landlords and therefore provides an indication of the landholdings of people with the surname in Ireland at the time.

Some Cruises still held land in Dublin and Meath, and there were still Cruice landlords in Cruicetown in County Meath. It is however somewhat surprising that the largest landholdings are now in the west and south west in counties Galway, Clare and Limerick.

For anyone with an interest in surname mapping I recommend a visit to Howard's Geogenealogy website which provides a wealth of information on the subject and lots of interesting links.

I'm rather hoping that Steve Archer will one day come up with a good mapping program for Ireland. A 1901 census surname atlas is possibly on the cards, but Griffiths gives better distribution because it captures the Irish population at a critical point in Irish history.

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The material on these pages is copyright Debbie Kennett or reproduced with permission from other copyright owners. It may be downloaded and printed for personal reference, but not otherwise copied, altered in any way or transmitted to others (unless explicitly stated otherwise) without the written permission of Debbie Kennett.